Editorial: Glad it's over in Pennsylvania

Wednesday

Apr 23, 2008 at 12:01 AMApr 23, 2008 at 10:15 PM

The Pennsylvania presidential primary is over, not a merciful moment too soon for a contest that has highlighted all that’s wrong with American politics — the mind-boggling length of the election season, the almost criminal spending, the IQ-sapping focus on the trivial and just the general nastiness.

The Pennsylvania presidential primary is over, not a merciful moment too soon for a contest that has highlighted all that’s wrong with American politics — the mind-boggling length of the election season, the almost criminal spending, the IQ-sapping focus on the trivial and just the general nastiness.

All of that culminated for us with last week’s debate on ABC, where the two moderators — Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos — spent 45 minutes grilling the two Democrat candidates on personal, tangential matters that already have been covered ad nauseam before coming to a question that even remotely smacked of mattering to the daily lives of most Americans.

Indeed, if the economy is the “No. 1 issue on Americans’ minds,” as Stephanopoulos said, then why was it the 16th question of the evening, making him a punchline on the late-night comedy circuit? Apparently, the economy also is less important than his other doozy to Obama about whether his pastor “loves America as much as you do.”

Character is important. If the answers to these questions gave us some special insight into how these candidates would perform under intense pressure in the Oval Office, we’d say go for it. But what more can Obama possibly say about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that he hasn’t already? What more can Hillary Clinton say regarding her fib about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia as first lady a dozen years ago? Make up your mind about those issues and move on.

In fact, we’ll take a candidate who’s actually read the Constitution over someone who conspicuously wears a flag pin on his lapel to cover for not having done so. That was another question put to Obama, along with one about his supposed sin of association with a 1960s-era radical. It’s a wonder Obama wasn’t asked, “Are you now, or have you even been, a communist?”

It’s not just the Democrats. Don’t get us going on the attention Republican John McCain’s wife Cindy got over some apparently plagiarized food recipes. We’re electing the leader of the free world, not Betty Crocker.

All of this while soaring gasoline prices eat up more of our paychecks, while the war in Iraq enters its sixth year and we prepare to send more troops to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, while retiring baby boomers threaten to bust Medicare and Social Security, while health-care costs handicap the middle class and the competitiveness of American industry.

Sorry, but Obama being one lousy bowler just isn’t significant. So what if he thinks some small-town Pennsylvanians are “bitter” about their situations? No doubt some are. The guy or gal you’d most like to have a beer with does not necessarily make the best president. All of us ought to try having a microphone in our face 24/7 and see how often we slip up. McCain confused the Sunnis and Shiites while on a tour of the Middle East recently and had to be corrected. We’re electing humans, not robots.

That said, we do expect the candidates to have and to share, by now, some blueprint for what they plan to do in office. Both Democrats took a no-new-taxes-for-the-middle-class pledge last week, which is foolish and inconsistent with some of their other proposals. Comments like those are revealing.

Meantime, Obama spent money like mad in Pennsylvania — How far would his $400,000 a day go toward providing doctor visits for impoverished Philadelphia kids? — and Clinton hit him with below-the-belt TV commercials like the one showing Osama bin Laden and scenes from Pearl Harbor while asking, “Who do you think has what it takes?” To excuse that away as preparation for the rough-and-tumble that’s likely to come later is always the last refuge of the desperate.

We’d like to believe Americans are sick of such politics — “gotcha politics,” someone named George W. Bush once described them. We’ve certainly had enough of Pennsylvania’s.

State Journal-Register

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